Week 16: MP & JD

 Some ornamental drawings!

Starting with MP

Chosing a pair of Rye Pottery cats from Sussex, MP created this drawing in an Art Spectrum 300gsm HP pad with Prismacolor watercolor pencils and 2H graphite. Two nicely rendered statuettes that are well proportioned with good attention to detail. MP says she tried to bring back white highlights with a white pastel pencil, then a Uniglo Signo white gel pen. As MP discovered, a gel pen will not draw easily over heavy pencil layers or pastel. She has asked what would have been the best way to establish white highlights in the cats - the trick is to remember to always treat the paper white as your whitest tone and avoid drawing in those areas. Strong contrast helps as well, so MP could have built up the cats in darker tones of greys or blues to help accentuate the white of the paper. The darkest areas tend to be the outlines - graduating that dark in would get rid of the outline and help to create form and bring up the highlight. Remember too that you can always 'lift' out highlights with an eraser or Bluetack.

Compositionally this is a half-and-half work - by that I mean the work is strongly divided in two by the positioning of the cats. Reinforcing this division is the way the cats are looking away from each other and out of the page. This leads our eyes away off the page instead of revolving around and back. I would have approached the composition of this differently and arranged the two cats so they were facing each other, maybe slightly offset, one higher than the other, so even though the design is still cut in half, our eyes would follow their eyes back and forth, keeping our gaze within the image rather than being drawn to the edges.

A good choice of subjed MP, well drawn. I can see you love these little cats from Sussex.

'Two Little Cats from Sussex' by MP

JD

JD loves to walk and on her walks she always has an eye out for the odd rock or two, and so, over the years she has amassed a collection of lovely, colourful and unusual stones that she displays in a stoneware dish. This is the subject for her 'Ornament' drawing this week.

Her drawing shows a lovely selection of stones in a pleasing arrangement contrasting the shapes and colours. She drawn this in a Windsor Newton 200gsm heavyweight paper diary with Faber Castell colour pencils and HB pencil. JD tells me she also used that Mexican thingy... the 'tortilla' to blend with- lol - it's a TORTILLION or paper stump - guess your and Monika's spell checker keep correecting that for you.   

The stones are nicely rendered and the balance of colours is good. I think the very white stone stands out a little bit and could use just a touch of shading on the shadow edge to give it better form. I like the shadow placed under the bowl. JD says she is not 100% happy with the bowl shadow and considered adding a line behind the bowl to indidcate the edge of a table, but I don't think that is needed. What I do think is that the shape of the shadow tells me that the bowl is very deep, but the shadows within the bowl tell me it is shallow. So perhaps the shadow shape should be altered? I did a rough 3Dpaint scribble to show you this and the rock so you can compare and see if you like it or not before changing anything.

A really pleasing work JD, you should be very pleased with this one.

'Rock Collection' by JD

Suggested modification by Linda